THOMAS HARDY IN DORSET

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31724, 6 July 1968, Page 4

THOMAS HARDY IN DORSET

IBv

R. A. COPLAND)

In Dorchester, from July 7 to July 20, a festival is being held to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the death of Thomas Hardy. Events, musical, dramatic, terpsichorean, and exhibitions, agricultural, architectural and military (e.g. relics of the Queen’s Own Dorset Yeomanry) will abound in rich and oblique references to the great novelist and poet whose 88 years were begun, largely spent, and fittingly ended in the County of Dorset.

It is inevitable that a writer whose imaginings were given such a precise habitation as Hardy’s, should be honoured in the places where he both shaped and placed his experiences. What is just as inevitable is that to hold the Presidential Lunch at the “Trumpet Major,” to have children folk-dancing at Maumbury Rings, The Mellstock Choir singing in Puddletown Church and C. Day Lewis lecturing in the Corn Exchange, tends to make an 1 institution of a highly individual spirit and to imprison the writer in the alphabet he used. Yet Hardy is notoriously difficult to “place” in the literary-histori-cal scheme, “belonging” as he does neither to the social realists whe preceded him, nor to the self-communing symbolists who followed. Post-Darwinian as he may be, we do better perhaps to “place" him as poet and story-teller with Wordsworth and Crabbe, even with Gray and Thomson. Otherwise he must be placed simply in Dorset

There are many who would wish to rescue Hardy from his regionalism, seeking primarily to present the tragic philosopher. To them “Wessex” is hardly more than a colourful metaphor, which, when Hardy moved into the realm of fiction, was imposed upon him by the convention of realism. Certainly it is a shallow reading of the novels which does not remark a difference in kind between the country tales, the “little ironies,” the “crusted characters,” and the major novels like “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” “The Return of the Native” and “Tess.” But the truth of the matter io that, though Wessex is not Dorset, still the actual, peculiar local phenomena of southwest England in the midnineteenth century are as essential to Hardy’s fiction as the brain is to the mind. The significance of Wessex is as much temporal as it is local. Apart from the fact that Hardy himself could have read both Wordsworth’s “Prelude” and Eliot’s “Waste Land” on their first publication, the country he pondered in his novels long endured, he has told us, as a rural antiquity in an Industrial era. By moving between the metropolis and the village Hardy was bringing into sombre contrast the future and the past lit is as much the nostalgia, whether melancholy or sweet produced by this contrast that evokes and characterises his poetry and fiction as any arrangement of contrasts of a more philosophical cast.

Moreover, when the most appreciative account has been taken of the tragic and ironic

vision of Hardy as meditative philosopher, it seems a temperamental rather than a systematic world-view. It broods upon rather than examines the evidence; and the haplessness of his creatures becomes something less to be railed against than mourned. What is strong and formative in his writing is the line of his narrative, the steady development of cause and effect, the causes having always to do with character, the effects being influenced by fate. And both are of the region, for character Itself becomes an aspect of locality, while fate bears down upon its victim from the local recesses of time, of legend. Hardy conveys this Impression of a fatal time pressure both by the intricate chronology of coincidence within the plots and by the presence upon the immediate scene of those memorials to past ambitions and defeats—the silent yet eloquent relics of Celt, Roman, Saxon and Norman. The history too, then, is palpable in the region. If it Is the narrative progression that forms the work (however the pessimism may inform it), the stories themselves are local in provenance. Thus Hardy has been regarded as a maker of great prose ballads. Like Scott, he saw that the more deeply indigenous was the tale the longer was its survival in the memories of local men. Then by the attrition of survival some core of austere and universal relevance was uncovered. Such was the case with ballads. The characters become stripped therefore to simple archetypes of passion or fidelity, victims already as it were, marked down in their lives by the legends that ensured their survival in memory. It may appear that neither the malignity of the

gods who kill us for their sport, nor the pensive bitterness of Hardy himself, Is the ultimate arbiter in these rural destinies, but the strange habit of plain men’s minds to seize and preserve instances of Ironical chance, of fateful choices and of personal misfits in the orderly scheme of things. In a sense Hardy was such a plain man and responded as a native to the legends of Ms place. The great difference between Dorset and “Wessex” is that insisted upon by Hardy himself. He distinguished between “temporary truth” and “eternal truth”; between the realist writers of “scrupulous exactness" who “paint places with endless detail” and the “great imaginations which create and transform.” Whenever he speaks of his work he defends it in terms familiar among the Romantics. The mere actuality of a

region has no place in art: it is rather the subject for “merely mechanical reporting.” The art of the true poet and novelist involves a dynamic relationship between the observed and the observer. This is a relationship attained, says Hardy, by the play of the imaginative reason upon the objects of its contemplation. The stories themselves so strain our credulity that if they were detached from this rich environment they would appear merely primitive and even absurd. But as It is, the vision of Dorset that became Hardy’s Wessex forever extends Itself not only to accommodate these fateful errings but positively to account for them. By a strange paradox those who gather in honour of Hardy at Dorchester will see about them not the reality but the illusion of Wessex.